


And sometimes, we just wait

by fleetfoot1



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Robin (Comics), DCU, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Damian Wayne is Robin, Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne Bonding, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Gen, Hurt Dick Grayson, Hurt/Comfort, Protective Damian Wayne, damian is struggling, dick grayson gets tortured, it's really not that violent at all, just don't wanna trigger anyone if that sort of thing affects you in the slightest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:55:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23372773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleetfoot1/pseuds/fleetfoot1
Summary: The day had started so well, too, which is probably why it all went to shit so fast.Nightwing and Robin get kidnapped in a mugging gone wrong, but Damian doesn't know how to hold out in an interrogation when he's not the one being tortured.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne
Comments: 33
Kudos: 344





	1. Chapter 1

The day had started so well, too, which is probably why it all went to shit so fast. 

“Do anything interesting while I was gone, Lil’ D?” Grayson asked, perched leisurely on a ledge hanging off the edge of a building while twirling an escrima between his fingers.

Damian rolled his eyes. “No _Nightwing_ , nothing in particular.” He paused for a moment. “I did find a stray cat in the alley by the coffee shop Red Robin tends to frequent. I brought it home, and pending the approval of Agent A, I’d like to keep it until it is well enough to live on its own again.”

Dick’s eyes widened. “Did you name it?”

Damain focused his gaze on a distant building. “Dorothea,” he muttered under his breath. 

Dick opened his mouth to respond but quickly turned his head toward a distant scream near the docks. “Mugging,” he murmured. He shot Damian a grin. “Let’s go, Robin.”

They quickly ran about two blocks from where they had been stationed and jumped into the fray, Nightwing taking the would-be muggers by surprise while Robin tried to usher the young couple away. An arraignment Damian was not thrilled with, but had been assigned despite the amount of dirty looks he had given Father and Grayson. “ _Robin just strikes people trustworthy, and we need to use that to our advantage whenever we can,_ ” Father had said. Damian let out a slight snarl at the thought and the couple he had been trying to reassuringly heard away flinched back. He barely held back an eye roll before muttering some useless words of comfort and moving them towards the end of the alley way.

He turned back to glance at Nightwing as Dick slammed the last mugger’s skull against the concrete sidewalk, not noting the way one of the ladies’ hand slipped into her coat pocket. He saw Nightwing’s face drop and barely made out his brief cry of warning before something heavy and metallic made contact with the back of his head, and the world went briefly blurry before turning black altogether. 

Damian woke to his hands bound behind his back on an uncomfortable metal chair. He kept his head limply hanging forward and strained his ears in an attempt to make out any thing about his surroundings. After a minute of nothing but silence, he lifted his head, taking a cursory glance around the room before focusing on the limp figure clad in black and blue seated in front of him. 

“Nightwing,” he ground out. “Nightwing, you need to get up.”

Dick let out a quiet moan, but Damian was stopped from continuing when the door swung open with a loud clang. The woman who had knocked Damian out strutted towards him, her steps slow and deliberate and seemingly unafraid of the two vigilantes she had bound in front of her. 

She walked up to Nightwing and struck him across the face, his head whipping to the side as he blinked in an attempt to orient himself. A growl slipped past Damian’s lips and he began tugging at the restraints around his wrists in an attempt to free himself. The woman shot him a grin over her shoulder, briefly turning away from Dick. “Protective, aren’t you?”

Damian’s lips pulled back to bare his teeth. “Touch him again and I’ll skin you alive,”

The woman let out a snort. She stepped into his personal space, leaning close to him to murmur in his face. “That would have been slightly more intimidating if it hadn’t come from the mouth of a pre-pubescent kid who’s stalling until his partner can break him out,” she crooned. 

“Get the hell away from him,” Dick rasped, whatever beating he had taken before getting knocked out clearly taking its toll on him. 

The woman straightened, heeled boots clicking against the floor as she stood between the Robin and Nightwing, glancing back and fourth between them. “How are you two related, anyway? Just friends, connected in the mutual goal of making Gotham’s underworld’s life hell? Is he your son?” she asked, gesturing to Damian before looking over at Dick. “No, you’re too young to have a kid his age. Brothers?” She watched Nightwing’s jaw tense, even as he held her gaze in attempt to not give anything away. She let out a slight laugh, twinkling like shards of glass scraping against one another. “Brothers it is then.”

Damian slowly lifted his gaze to where he had it fixed on the ground in front of him to glare at her. She let out another laugh.

“You know,” she said, strolling over to him and taking Damian’s chin in her hand, as if he was a child receiving a scolding. “I thought Nightwing would be the harder one to break in an interrogation. But I’m beginning to realize,” she said, looking Dick up and down before turning back to Damian, “that it might be you instead.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And breaking the stubborn ones is always much more fun.”

Damian went rigid, but it was Dick who yelled out in a voice that only ten years of working under Batman could produce, “If you hurt him, I swear to god you’ll never be out long enough to see the sun in Gotham ever again.”

The woman let out a bewildered laugh. “Don’t you worry, Nightwing, it’s not him I’m planning to hurt.” She looked him up and down before jerking her chin at the thugs lining the outside of the room. They came forward and hauled Grayson to his feet who, despite his confident facade, was barely strong enough to make a weak attempt at flailing out of their grip before getting hauled out of the room. 

“A shame,” she said, and Damian’s gaze, which was fixed on Dick with poorly concealed horror, snapped up to meet hers. “He was a pretty one, too.”

The woman, who still hadn’t said her name, Damian realized with profound irritation, dragged a chair from the side of the room and sat down in it directly in front of Damian, their knees nearly touching. 

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Here’s how this is going to go,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ears as Damian struggled to fight the panic building in his chest. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to give me the answers I want.” She cocked a brow. “Is that understood?”

Damian spit in her eye.

She let out a disgusted grunt, reaching up to use the back of her hand to wipe at her face. “Clearly not,” she muttered. “Then I suppose we’ll just sit here and wait until you do.” She settled back into her chair, crossing her arms across her chest and resting one ankle atop the other. For a while, the room seemed pin drop silent, but after a few minutes, Damian barely picked up the sounds echoing from the adjacent room Grayson had been dragged into. 

The faint sound of fists meeting flesh. The occasional gasp of pain. A soft groan after a series of particularly quick blows. 

“What are they doing,” Damian breathed out. 

The woman looked up from examining her nails. “You seem like a smart boy. I’m sure you’ve put it together,” she said with a smirk. “Are you prepared to answer my questions?”

“I’m not telling you anything, harlot,” Damian snapped automatically.

Her gaze hardened. “A pity.”

She nodded to one of the men standing in the corner of room, who then pulled out a walkie talkie and muttered something into it. 

An agonized scream came from the adjacent room shortly after.

Damian _knew_ Nightwing. And he knew it took _a lot_ to make him scream like that.

“Stop this,” Damian said through gritted teeth, his entire body tensing and frantically trying to feel his way to a weak point on the ropes holding him down. “If it’s me you want answers from, hurt me, _not Nightwing_ ,” he said, his voice rising to a shout in a weak attempt to intimidate the woman seated in front of him. Her smile just widened.

“Aw,” the woman crooned. “Is the baby bird worried about his older brother?” Her question was punctuated with another scream, this one cut off by the thud of a fist meeting Dick’s body armor and a pained gasp. 

Damian strained fruitlessly at the bods around his wrists and legs. “Let him go, _you psychotic bitch_!”

The woman gave him a smirk over the dull thuds and strangled gasps issuing from the room adjacent. She tilted her head to the side, as if she was asking an innocent question purely out of curiosity. “What’s the Batman’s real name?”

Damian flinched and made eye contact with the floor for a moment before looking back up and responding. “I,” he paused for a moment, frantically trying to come up with answer the woman would like. “I can’t answer that.”

The woman clicked her tongue, sounding more like a disappointed tutor than anything else at that point. “A shame.” She paused for a moment, before a grin overtook her face. “Alright then.” She gestured in the direction that the thugs had dragged Nightwing off in. “What’s _his_ real name?”

“ _Please_ ,” Damian rasped, desperation taking over his voice. His mind ran at a million miles a minute, and he spit out the first words he could think of in a frantic attempt to get the thugs to stop attacking Dick. “I--I don’t know. I don’t know who he is outside of Nightwing.”

The woman’s face hardened, and she took Damian’s face in her hand with a grip hard enough to bruise, her nails already leaving red crescent-shaped indentations over his cheeks. “Uh uh, darling,” she crooned. “I already know you’re brothers. I’ll let you avoid my questions as long as you want, but if you start lying to me, we’re going to have some problems.” She jerked the hand holding him and snarled in his face. “ _Is that understood?_ ”

Damian grimaced, his lips pulling back from his teeth in an attempt to revive some of the bravado of before. “Yes,” he breathed. 

She released his face. “Good. Now,” She lifted the walkie-talkie back to her mouth, and held Damian’s gaze as a sense of dread pooled in his stomach. “Waterboard him.”

Damian jerked, straining his arms and finally feeling the skin of his wrists split and bleed as he tried to get out of the bonds. “I agreed!” He snarled. “I promised I would tell the truth!”

The woman rolled her eyes. “Yes, but you lied just before that, didn’t you?” Her smile returned. “I have to make sure you get the point.“

The next few seconds were filled with the most terrifying silence Damian had ever experienced in his life. The panic already building in his chest was on the rise, and he was slowly finding it harder to breathe. After about a minute of silence from the adjacent room, there was a strangled cough. The sound of flesh hitting the chair. A wet whimper and gasp followed as Dick’s body eventually gave into the urge to inhale. Pain pricked behind Damian’s eyeballs, and he struggled to keep his breathing steady as he realized how utterly useless he was. How he should have been able to get him and Dick out ages ago. 

“I’ll give you one more shot at a question,” the woman purred. “What’s _your_ real name, Robin?”

Instinctively, he wanted to answer. He’d give up his identity for Grayson’s life in a heartbeat. Damian’s mouth opened, “Da--” the sound coming out before he realized the implications of exactly what he was doing. That if he said his own name, it would unravel everything. Father, Drake, Todd, Pennyworth--and eventually Grayson himself. He was truly, completely useless. The pang in his chest deepened, but be shut his mouth as quickly as he could, shifting his gaze to the gray floor tiles in front of him and shook his head minutely.

The woman shrugged, looking utterly unbothered by him. “Alright, then,” she said, relaxing into her chair. “I suppose we’ll just have to wait.”

Damian felt a sort of numbness creeping over him, starting in his chest and extending out to his fingertips and the tips of his toes. The gaze he had stubbornly fixed on the opposite wall blurred, and everything he heard shifted into a sort of bleak white noise that overtook his thoughts. Grayson’s screams and moans and gasps of pain all melded together in a wave that would strike him intermittently, but Damian let it all wash over him, his gaze unflinching and utterly resigned to the fact that he wasn’t capable enough to help either of them.

And he waited. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took forever to update! wasn't feeling the motivation for a while but i finally got it together

Damian had long since lost track of time since he and Dick had been captured. The yells he had been forced to listen to from the adjacent room had gradually grown more frequent, likely as Grayson’s resolve had given out, and the noises seemed to come out more hoarse with each passing minute. That, combined with the occasional snap of bone and wet cough of exhaustion left Damian tensed in his seat so long that his entire body seemed to ache. He gradually fell into a slumped heap, the effort of trying to hold himself together and block out the sounds that kept coming from that _god damned_ room exhausting him, and he felt more useless with each passing minute. The woman sat in front of him, idly twirling a piece of hair between her fingers and looking up each time Damian shifted, clearly growing bored with his insubordination but allowing the silence to continue.  
  
Damian’s eyes had started to burn from being fixed in one place for so long when he watched the woman rise from her chair. Her face dropped in an expression of poorly concealed panic, and she was muttering under her breath as she frantically backed away from the black-clad figure that seemed to emerge from the shadows. “No, listen, please,” she murmured, and her obnoxiously high heels twisted beneath her ankles as she tried to move away. “I didn’t, I--” The rest of her sentence was cut off by a swift tap to the temple by Batman’s black gauntlets, and the rest of the men in the room dropped like flies just as quickly. 

Batman knelt in front of his chair, pulling a batarang from his belt. “Robin,” he growled, “repo--”

“Nightwing,” Damian breathed, the panic he had tried so hard to suppress the rest of the night finally fighting it’s way to the surface. 

Batman’s jaw tensed but he continued to work at Robin’s bonds, the stubborn set of his body emphasizing that he didn’t plan on moving. “He’d want me to look after you first,” he said. 

Robin growled, his voice low and dangerous, “He likely would if he was conscious enough to form a sentence right now, which I guarantee to you, he’s not.”

Batman’s hand shook a bit as he lodged the batarang in the chair, the only sign of the worry that had taken over his thoughts. He left Robin to free himself before crossing the warehouse to the small room in the corner that Damian had been glaring at throughout their conversation. “Nightwing,” Bruce called. At the lack of response, his voice grew more insistent, more irritated. “Nightwing, repo--” Bruce’s words were cut off, the draining of blood from his face the only other visible symbol of panic that seemed to take over his body. Damian sawed frantically with the batarang by his side and watched his father lunge into the room, murmuring words of comfort too low for Damian to hear.

Damian felt his bonds loosen, and was already in motion before they had the chance to hit the floor next to the chair he had been bound to. He winced a bit as his limbs regained blood flow, but he was sprinting across the warehouse as fast as he could before the pain really registered. When he reached the doorway to the room Nightwing was being kept in, his heart stuttered in his chest.   
  
Grayson was bound to a metal table, his arms spread eagle out to his sides while his legs were extended out to the corners. The whited-out slits of his eyes were slightly thinned, marking him to the experienced eye as unconscious, a fact Damian had never been more grateful to see. His entire torso was a latticework of strategic slices of various length and depth, covering his abdomen and the table beneath him in a shallow pool of blood. His face was bloodied too, combined with a smattering of purple bruises, and his hair was damp from a mix of blood, water and sweat. Damian felt something in his stomach twist violently at the sight of it. Dick’s arm was bent at an odd angle, and Damian could have sworn he could still see something sticking out of one of Dick’s ankles. 

Damian felt the world around him tilt slightly, and Bruce had to yell his name twice before he blinked blearily at him, finally tearing his gaze from Grayson’s mutilated body in front of him. “Prep the car,” Batman said, cool and collected as always, but Damian could have sworn he heard a twinge of something different. Something as close to panic as he had ever heard from his father. “It’s outside, about 500 feet from the entrance form the building. I’m going to bring Nightwing, but I need you to radio Agent A and to sit with him while I drive. Do it, Robin.” The utter command in his set Damian into motion before he had really registered it, but for once, he was grateful for it. 

He stumbled to the batmobile in a blur, calling Pennyworth and delivering the instructions in an automatic haze. When father brought Nightwing out, Damian helped lay him in the backseat, settling Grayson’s head in his lap. A soft moan came from Dick’s mouth, and Damian began absently stroking his hair in attempt toe calm him down. He took a deep breath. “What about the--”

“I’ve already informed Gordon,” he said, the gruff undertones of his voice that Damian had come to associate with the cowl lifted the slightest bit, Bruce Wayne starting to come through over the shadows of Batman. “He’ll be here in the next few minutes.”

As the batmobile sped back towards Wayne Manor, Damian kept shifting his gaze back and fourth between the window beside him to Grayson’s face. He kept up this vigil for the majority of the ride, but one of the times he glanced back at Nightwing, something felt...odd. Uncomfortably silent. It was then when he paused his gaze on the blue symbol stretching over Grayson’s chest that it clicked. 

“Father,” Damian started, the overwhelming sense of panic building in his chest for what seemed like the billionth time that night. He readjusted himself, removing Grayson’s head from his lap so Damian could kneel above him, his hands already poised above his chest. “Grayson isn’t breathing,”  
  
“What,” Bruce snapped, pressing down further on the accelerator. 

“His lips are slightly blue,” Damian began. “Heart rate is thready, but present. He’s still unconscious,” Damian swallowed. “Beginning chest compression now.”

Damian stopped hearing the world around him, his entire being focused on moving his body up and down in an attempt to get Grayson’ breathing on his own again. He cursed himself for being so damned small that made it so difficult to push the two inches downward into Grayson’s sternum. He cursed the damn muggers that kept them tied up for so long. He cursed Grayson for letting himself be taken after Damian was knocked out. But most of all, he cursed himself for opening his damned mouth during that initial interrogation. For giving that stupid bitch of a woman a reason to hurt Nightwing instead of Robin. 

He found his breathing aligning with his movements, but eventually felt his own chest heaving with sobs. Sobs from his frustration, his anger, his panic--every emotion he had felt throughout the night until he couldn’t feel anything else beyond that overwhelming sense of failure. His tears blurred his vision, and the sound of the car and his own breathing blended together into a sort of white noise that blocked everything else out. He felt a presence drag him off Grayson’s unresponsive body and watched a lithe pair of hands take Grayson away. Damian’s sobs transforming into screams as he clawed at the armored hands holding him firmly against a kevlar-clad chest. 

One of those hands grabbed at his wrists, pinning them to his side and preventing him from fighting back. The other was gripping his chin firmly but gently, forcing him to meet the tired pale blue eyes of the person in front of him. Father. Kneeling so that he was eye level with Damian, cowl down, repeating his name over and over until Damian stopped yelling and fighting, finally falling into a panicked silence while his father held his gaze. Damian was trembling--he hadn’t even realized when he’d started, and his father was gripping his shoulder in an attempt to steady him. He held Robin there a moment longer, before reaching up to peel the domino mask from his face. Damian didn’t object. 

“Are you alright,” Bruce asked. Damian finally found the ability to speak coherently again. “Grayson--” he rasped, his voice hoarse from the screams he hadn’t realized were loud enough to cause. “--is being taken care of,” his father finished. “Come on,” he said, tugging gently on Damian’s shoulder until he followed. “Dick would want me to check on you.”

Damian sat in silence on the examining table as his father cut bandages and began gently wiping the blood off of Damian’s head. Damian wanted to laugh. It was from that initial hit that knocked him out. He hadn’t even realized he was bleeding. 

His father’s movements were nearly robotic beside him. Gentle, but not as though he was truly focused on wrapping Damian’s injury. He seemed faraway, his thoughts drifting to the other son in the adjacent room. 

“You’re worried about him,” Damian rasped. 

Bruce paused in his wrappings for the briefest of moments before continuing. “Yes. I am,” He took a breath. “I don’t think I’ve seen him in this bad a condition in years.”

The guilt that had been steadily eating Damian’s insides alive like a parasite seemed to rear its head again, further burrowing into the hole in his chest. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t--”

“Damian,” Bruce cut him off, tying off the bandage on his head firmly and gripping Damian’s shoulder with his free hand. “This is not your fault. I’m sure you did everything you could.” 

“But if I hadn’t--” Damian started again. 

“Dick is Nightwing,” Bruce answered firmly. “He’s got years of experience on you. If anything went bad during this whole event, it’s because ten years of preparedness didn’t help. It’s not your responsibility to look after him.”

“It should have been me,” Damian whispered.   
  
His father seemed to bite back an irritated sigh. “I wasn’t there,” he said after a brief pause. “So I won’t try and sugarcoat this whole thing and pretend you played no part in this. But what I do know,” he continued, “is that Dick would disagree.” He held Damian’s gaze until Damian finally gave in and looked away. 

“Get some sleep,” Bruce added. 

“Grayson--” Damian began. 

“--Is not going anywhere” Bruce finished. 

Damian pinned him with a glare. Batman or not, he wasn’t planning on losing this argument. Bruce rolled his eyes and turned towards the stairs. “I’ll be upstairs in the study. Let me know if his condition changes.”

Damian nodded in response and pulled up a chair in front of the computer. He pulled up the files for the night and began writing out the report for everything that happened. Somewhere between the third and fourth page of notes, he felt his eyes become unbelievably heavy. He stared at the screen in front of him as long as he could, but eventually his head lolled and he passed out against the armrest of the chair. 

  
Damian woke to his father--now clothed in gray sweatpants and a t-shirt rather than the batsuit--gently shaking his shoulder over the warm woolen blanket that had been tugged over him. Bruce barely had the chance to tilt his head towards the med bay and murmur “He’s awake,” before Damian sprang to his feet, sprinting into the room where Grayson was recovering. 

Grayson was laying down, his bed elevated the slightest bit, likely at his own demands, but still low enough to allow him to sleep comfortably. His cheeks were tinged pink, and he seemed to release a long held breath when he saw Damian enter the room. His voice came out a hoarse rasp. “Hey, Lil D.”

“Grayson,” Damian responded, unable to meet his eyes. Damian began mindlessly adjusting the pillows surrounding Dick, trying his best to hold himself together. “Why is your face so pink?”

Said face seemed to turn an even darker shade of red. “Bruce decided to give me the ‘Robin that was irresponsible and idiotic’ lecture, despite the fact that one, we couldn’t have done anything to avoid this, and two, I haven’t been robin for over ten years now,” he said, rolling his eyes. 

Damian took a deep breath, straightening to look Dick in the eye. “Grayson, I apologize for my performance tonight,” he said firmly, fighting to keep his voice from wavering. “I was far too emotionally driven, and it won’t happen again.”

Dick stared back at him blankly. “What?

Damian felt that same painful prickling behind his eyes taking over again, and he looked to the spot over Dick’s shoulder when he no longer had the strength to hold his gaze. “I let the woman bait me, and it was because of that that she--”

“Damian, stop,” Dick cut him off. “This wasn’t your fault.”

Damian scoffed. “Grayson, you and I both know that it most definitely was,”  
  
Dick rolled his eyes. “Damian you did everything exactly right. Hey, look at me,” he said, reaching to grab Damian’s chin and force him to meet Dick’s eyes. “I was in a compromised state, and you did everything I would have done if the roles were reversed. No one blames you for this, and you shouldn’t blame yourself either,”

Damian let out a shuddering breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, Grayson’s confession that he would have acted the same way being far more comforting than he expected. “Really?”

Grayson huffed a laugh then winced, waving off Damian’s jump up at the sound. “Yes, really. I’m fine, stop hovering. Just come here and keep me company.”

Damian hesitated, but Grayson waved him forward and Damian climbed into the bed with him, snuggling close and making sure to avoid disturbing the countless layers of bandages covering Grayson’s body. Damian let out of soft sigh and relaxed in the arms that wrapped around him. He wasn’t tired in the slightest, the nap father had ended up letting him take in front of the batcomputer being far more revitalizing than he expected. But Dick fell asleep almost immediately, and Damian found himself immensely comforted in the fact that he could stay so close to him while he healed and watched the steady rise and fall of his chest. 

He knew Grayson would be an absolute menace the second he woke up a second time, and would likely deem himself more than ready to leave the medbay in the cave. Father and Pennyworth would object, and Damian would watch the passive aggressive comments fling back and forth for a while until one side finally gave in. He closed his eyes in a rare moment of peace, enjoying the calm before the storm that would inevitably follow. But he’d stay with Grayson as long as he needed to, patiently waiting for when he was ready to wake up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> endings are hard ok? 
> 
> hit me up on tumblr @litrally! I'm always taking requests, so feel free to give me something on there or drop something in the comments!

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first time writing anything like this so i really hope you like it! <3 pls feel free to leave thoughts below


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